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Review Panel Assails `Needless' Secrecy On Data In Jfk Slaying

September 29, 1998|By From Tribune News Services.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — For decades, the government "needlessly and wastefully" withheld millions of records about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, causing Americans to mistrust their government, a federal review panel has concluded.

The Assassination Records Review Board closes shop this week after gathering and releasing a mountain of detail--tantalizing and mundane--about the slaying on Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas.

The documents it has collected in the past four years include new information about events in Dallas, alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, the presidential autopsy, and photographs and reactions of government agencies to the crime. It provides new fodder to be debated by historians and conspiracy theorists alike.

"The review board's experience leaves little doubt that the federal government needlessly and wastefully classified and then withheld from public access countless important records that did not require such treatment," the board said in its 208-page report.

Such secrecy "led the American public to believe that the government had something to hide," the report said. "Change is long overdue and the review board's experience amply demonstrates the value of sharing important information with the American public."

It plans to make its first public comment on the report after presenting it to President Clinton on Wednesday at the White House.

The board was created by Congress in response to public frustration that the government was withholding information.

Disagreement over the Warren Commission's 1964 conclusion that a lone gunman killed Kennedy, along with government conspiracy claims in Oliver Stone's 1991 movie "JFK," led to a consensus that it was time to open assassination records for public inspection.

The board, however, was not charged with reopening the investigation. While it added to the millions of documents at the National Archives touching on the assassination, it did not address the question: Who shot Kennedy?